i whored for art…

hell day 11 – boticelli unmasked as doré

I had this suspicion all along when I was using these etchings of Dante’s Inferno that they weren’t the ones by Botticelli, but I was a bit too lazy to check and anyway, having to a) remember some new dead artist’s name, and b) having to change the name of that section in hell to his name ensuring confusion all round meant it was easier to play dumb. I mean it all looks the same to me anyway. Art, that is.

But when it comes to programme notes, accuracy, truth, and genuineness are all that matters. So, all along when I’ve been talking about Botticelli’s etching for Dante’s Inferno, I actually meant Gustav Doré, from The Divine Comedy. Oops. So, now we have that all cleared up, back to hell.

We pretty much finished it today, beside a lot of populating of various scenes with hailstorms of detail, the occasional transition and blah-de-blah, wherever we got to today is what will be seen in the showings on the weekend. Botticelli (harhar) got finished today, 3 3/4 minutes of banging around on the floor, about as un-dance as I’ve ever got while still remaining excruciatingly choreographed. I think I should move onto brawl scenes in Hong Kong action flicks now. Now I just have to learn my bits in it myself, otherwise I’ve managed to choreograph myself out.

The big thing for me was the void scene, that was always so bloody intransigent and so absolutely crucial to the piece. Mostly this scene came from Joe Simpson’s narration of his “Bloody hell… I’m gonna die to Boney M” catastrophe Touching the Void, and the bit in Baudrillard in which the Suisse Doctor tried to get her patients to talk about their impending deaths, and has mostly been not working in that, “ooohhh… this is gonna be embarrassing” way. Today it got reduced to a blackout, with nothing more than Bonnie, lying on the floor, talking about her death. Very euro-trash.

In all seriousness, this scene is the one that the work is in orbit around. Much of the rest of the work is sufficiently grotesque, disturbing, strange, or just plain evil that it’s possible to look at it with something approaching detachment. Not that I make work with irony in it, but it could all be seen as a black, b-grade comedy. Bonnie lying there, unmoving, just talking is the bloody nose that makes all the fun stop. It unequivocally forces the rest of the piece to be seen through this really quite bleak and awful monologue. Or again it could just be the “ooohhh… this is gonna be embarrassing” bit. I don’t think so, but it’s always more interesting for me to make stuff that slides along precipice of cringe.